The archival turn has been pluralized and deferred continually in the last decade, engendering in turn a continual reimagination of not just the signifier “archive” but also of the approaches to it. Such reimaginations intervene and interrupt the disciplinary definitions of Comparative Literature, driving it to envision and invite newer frameworks, fueling the discipline’s core essence. The seminar attempts to argue that the radical capacities of the discipline stretch the limits of the archive and expand the subsequent approaches to it, and in so doing resist its own definitional restraints. Especially at the present moment of global unrest, when both the being of the archive and the access to it are under serious genocidal threats, the seminar asks how the comparative practice can model pathways of archival reparation, if not absolute recuperation. Alongside the inquiry of the primary concepts of archive and comparative literature, interest will be invested in un/learning the ethics and politics involved in approaching these concepts. Scholars engaged with archival theory across disciplines have proposed a shift towards embracing unverifiability over the verifiable, fiction over fact, disarray over neat documentation. The panels in the seminar asks if this vital skepticism evolving in archival theory towards the notion of “evidence” be generatively put in conversation with the disciplinary model of comparative literature that has, since its inception, been solely defined by such skepticism, be it in relation to the idea of a “text” or what qualifies as the “literary.” Simultaneously, the seminar aspires to imagine if the methodological eccentricities of comparative literature, that strategically refute binaries and boundaries, can allow archival theory and the archives to proliferate and expand in the imagined elsewhere. The seminar looks for papers that interrogate, but are not limited to, the following:

• How archives survive through interactions with other archives, and therefore what “other archives” stand for today?
• How to enter and exit an archive, and in the case of restricted entry, ways to approach (and/or “strike against”) the archive?
• If archives represent fiction, how might we conceptualize fiction today and vice-versa?
• Ways of negotiating with the institutionalization and institutionality of archives.
• Different registers of the archive—textual, visual, sonic, ephemeral, etc.—and their relationality with the idea of comparative literature.
• How might the overwhelming presence of AI as an all-encompassing archive be countered?
• The ubiquity of archives and of comparative literature.
• Archive, Affect, and Comparative Literature